Harriet Arnow's novel The Dollmaker

[Scrivener]

Having recently read it, I'm trying to get a handle on how realistic the Detroit settings in the book were. Arnow lived in Detroit during World War II, and many readers think the book is very realistic.

Can anyone tell me where Arnow lived in Detroit and which Detroit neighborhood was the real-life counterpart of "Merry Hill"?

[Lowell]

Maybe you could help us out with some quoted text examples.

[Meddle]

1984 film with Jane Fonda:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dollmaker

I always though it was Delray somewhere.

[archfan]

Harriette Arnow lived in Emerson Homes in northeastern Detroit.

http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/G-0006/G-0006.html

[EastsideAl]

Emerson was one of many "temporary" federal housing projects built during WWII to house defense workers and many of the others who were streaming into the city in those years. Strange as it is to think of it now, Detroit was in a massive housing crisis during the war years and for several years thereafter. Some of these "temporary" projects, which often consisted of tar paper and plywood barracks-style buildings or even quonset huts, were occupied through the '50s and into the '60s.

Emerson Homes was located between Nevada and Hildale, west of Concord going back to the railroad tracks. Today Sherwood St. has been cut through the area where the project once stood, and there's nothing there but some '50s and '60s era small factories, which look to be mostly abandoned.

Since Arnow herself lived there, I would assume that her description of life in these crowded wartime and post-war housing areas was reasonably accurate. In any event, as I remember it from many years ago, it is a great story and great book. As far as I know, no trace of these war-era projects are left today. Even most of Detroit's "permanent" federal housing projects from around that time have now been vacated, gutted, and torn down or replaced.

[EastsideAl]

These wartime projects tended to look like this:


[[This is the William J. McKeever Homes at Hoover & Seven Mile - where Osborn High School is now.)

After the war, several areas of public land in and near Detroit also had Quonset huts erected on them as temporary housing for returning veterans and their families.

[Scrivener]

Thanks to Archfan and EastsideAl for answering my question. If The Dollmaker was set in the Emerson Homes, then the nearby steel mill in the book would have been the Jones & Laughlin plant on Eight Mile and Mound in Warren. I tried to find out more about that plant but my searches online turned up virtually nothing, except a short piece about its closing in 1983 and its sale in 1994. Does anyone know exactly where that steel mill was?

[Detroitnerd]

It's a wonderful book. It's a really good look at wartime Detroit, with a lot of the little details you'd miss from the distance of seven decades. Reminds me of that Bobby Bare song, "Detroit City."